Public Sector is Multi-Sector. Do you believe it?
As I wrote previously, I believe that public sector is multi-sector. I continuously see my friends and colleagues who are passionate about public service do it from a number of angles.
Some are government employees.
Some are contractors.
Some are authors.
Some run non-profits.
But all truly care about improving government performance.
One of the great people in the space passionate about these issues is Brian Drake. He posted on his blog last week that he was moving from Deloitte and becoming a federal employee.
That transition is one I’ve seen more and more these days from peers who go back and forth.
An interest note was how many people did congratulate him and say “now you are one of us” or “thanks for joining the good side.”
I wonder if that’s just making conversation. Or do we still hold that divide as sacred? Thoughts?
I agree with you that the ecosystem is broad and many parties are working toward improving government performance. Not everyone who works for the government on government projects is a government employee. Many are consultants and/or contractors working on a fee for service basis. I think that this is only going to increase as the government works increasingly through allied parties working towards the same policy goals – either individuals or non-profits.
However, I still think there is a perceived difference between working for a for-profit corporation and being a public servant. (People working for non-profits fall somewhere in the middle, closer to one side or another of the spectrum depending on how much their non-profit is seen as being about “the public good”.)
Coming from local-level public procurement and now working for NIGP, a non-profit that supports public procurement, I love this concept of ‘multi-sector’. As a County Procurement Manager, I valued suppliers both as partners in solutions to public needs, and as customers in the procurement process. Now, as Research Director at NIGP, I have been exposed to the additional value provided by academicians, authors, and researchers. It truly is multi-sector!
It’ll be interesting to see how multi-sector evolves.
I think a lot of times there are perceived differences that often aren’t true – I had a friend who worked for a non-profit whose budget was 99% federal grants. But she said she would never work for the gov’t agency who funded the programs as they were big and evil and against her politics.
But in actuality she was really similar to the people running the program from the gov’t side.